A Great and Terrible King

by Marc Morris

  In the event there was no fighting in England. War was avoided when the earl of Gloucester, whose alliance with Montfort had seemed improbable from the start, reverted to type and rejoined the king -thanks, it was said, to bribes promised him by the queen. This final desertion compromised the opposition to the extent that further resistance became useless. Those men who remained with Montfort sought terms with the king, drawn in by Henrys promise of arbitration on the issue of the reform. Montfort himself, however, refused to submit. He had tried arbitration in the past and got nowhere. To obtain satisfaction of his personal grievances against Henry, the earl had to win power over him. That had not happened; the latest round had gone to the king. Deeply disappointed, and accusing his erstwhile allies of breaking their oaths, Montfort left for France, leaving an uneasy peace to settle on Henry's kingdom.

  And so 1261 drew to a close. For Henry and Eleanor it had been a year of great triumph. By guile and cunning, they had outmanoeuvred their opponents and overturned all the restrictions placed on royal authority. For Montfort, by contrast, the wheel had turned full circle. His refusal (on this occasion) to compromise may have bolstered his image in the country at large, and indeed his image of himself, but it had left him bereft of allies and facing a possibly permanent exile.

  If Montfort felt isolated by the end of 1261, so too did his former protege. One of the most galling developments in the past twelve months for Edward had been the very small number of his supporters that had been prepared to join him in desertion. His closest friends — Henry of Almain, for example — had remained in opposition. The same was true of the Marcher lords, such as Roger Clifford, who had joined his household in 1257 and contributed much to its martial reputation. That winter, as Edward celebrated Christmas and the New Year in Bordeaux, he must have contrasted the festivities with those of the previous year, when he and his friends had stopped in the city midway through their tour of the tournament fields. In spite of the collapse of Montfort's party and the peace made between the opposition and the king, there had as yet been no rapprochement between Edward and his former supporters.

  Nor was any rapprochement likely to occur, thanks to the vigorous scrutiny to which his parents had been subjecting his affairs in his absence. In the autumn of 1261 Henry and Eleanor began an audit of Edward's finances, and attributed the disarray they uncovered to profligacy and peculation on the part of his erstwhile acquaintances. Roger Clifford was one of the men who stood accused. Another was Roger Leybourne, who until the summer had been the steward of Edward's estates. Leybourne, in particular, was marked out as the chief culprit and charged with repaying the very heavy sum of £1,820.There was more to this than simply righting Edward's finances after a period of heavy and (quite possibly) irresponsible expenditure. The queen, especially, had never approved of the violent and unruly element in her son's household; men who (as she saw it) had encouraged him not only in squandering his money but also in his general disobedience. Having succeeded in dividing Edward from their company in 1261, she was now determined to keep them apart by driving further wedges between them. One well-informed chronicler blamed Eleanor for inciting her son against Leybourne and, if this was the case, by the spring of 1262 she had succeeded. In April Edward himself revoked a grant of land that he had made to his former steward some eighteen months before, a sure sign that the esteem that the gift had originally symbolised was now lost.

  Edward by this time was back in England, having returned towards the end of February. His primary concern seems to have been his parents' ongoing re-arrangement of his lands and finances. Henry and Eleanor, although they did not try to impose the same strict controls on their son as before, nonetheless took steps that were clearly intended to limit his ability for independent action, at least in the immediate future. In June 1262, for example, they contrived to reduce the size of his landed estate. Edward was persuaded to surrender, for three years, sizeable parts of his endowment, in return for which he was compensated with a slice of royal revenue. Significantly, the major losses were all in England and Wales. His territories in Gascony and Ireland were unaffected, and the intention may well have been to try and confine Edward's political ambitions to these overseas dominions. England was only recently pacified; his continued presence there might serve as a rallying point for further trouble. As it was, he had little incentive to stay. Immediately after this new deal had been agreed, he returned to France.

  Estranged from his friends, deprived of his lands, and lacking any obvious political purpose, in the summer of 1262 Edward entered one of the most listless stages of his adult life. He did at least find some new companions with whom to share it. Since the winter of 1260 there had been a number of French knights in his household. Edward now increased their number, to the point where new recruits from Burgundy, Champagne and Flanders became the dominant element. With this new entourage, he once again took to the tournament field. According to one hostile English chronicler, the new tour began badly, with Edward himself being beaten and gravely wounded soon after his arrival in France. Nothing points to a concern with any more serious pursuits — there is no evidence, for example, to suggest that on this occasion Edward paid a visit to Gascony to attend in person to the duchy's affairs. It would be unfair to describe his activities as frivolous, but he does appear directionless, cut adrift. Much of the summer and autumn he spent in Paris, to where his parents had travelled in pursuance of their feud with Simon de Montfort. Inevitably the arbitration proposed between the earl and his in-laws failed, collapsing in a blizzard of mutual recrimination. In December Henry and Eleanor returned to England, leaving Montfort angry and unreconciled in his political isolation.Their son, however, did not go with them. He too lingered on the Continent, saying he would come back at a later date. The reasons for Edward's self-imposed exile also remained in place: he saw no urgent need to hurry home.

  But then he had not heard the latest of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The prince, already impatient for a permanent peace with England, had concluded by the autumn of 1262 that he had been wasting his time. The English had not respected the truces they had granted him; the Marcher lords were attacking his lands. It is even possible that Llywelyn had learned of Henry Ill's opinion, expressed in a letter during the summer, that the recent Welsh conquests were illegitimate and must be reversed. Either way, the prince was now angry enough to throw off all restraint. At the end of November he and his army overran the whole of the middle March, raiding and burning into Herefordshire. The Welsh war against England had been resumed on the fullest scale. Henry III received this bad news as soon as he landed in England, a few days before Christmas. Already in an ill-humour — an epidemic in Paris had nearly killed him, and had carried off scores of his friends and servants — the king immediately dispatched a petulant letter to his eldest son, chiding him for his complacency in remaining abroad while his lands in Wales burned. This was hardly fair, but then Henry's barbs hardly mattered: all Edward saw was the opportunity he had been waiting for, a chance to win renown and respect in an arena where he had once been humiliated. On 24 February he landed at Dover, and by the start of April he had arrived in the March.

  But his return had unseen and far-reaching side effects. As in Wales, so too in England: everywhere there was deep dissatisfaction with Henry Ill's rule. The king, in restoring himself to power the previous year, had gone too far. Overthrowing his council was one thing; but Henry had also swept away all the good work of reform — the aspect of the Provisions that had proved so very popular from the first. By the summer of 1262 men had begun openly to denounce the royal regime, prompting a government crackdown in response. Henry himself was an obvious target for public reproach, but in his subjects' eyes the real villains were his foreign advisers. It was Queen Eleanor and her Savoyard circle who were correctly perceived as the principal architects of the king's return to unfettered power.

  In this general atmosphere of hostility, nobody harboured greater resentment against the government than Edward's fo
rmer friends. Roger Clifford, Roger Leybourne and their companions were still incensed at the way they had been parted from their former leader and harassed on the orders of his mother. By the second half of 1262 they were already demonstrating signs of being dangerously disaffected, going about in arms and holding unlicensed tournaments. The country as a whole was combustible, but these desperadoes were the explosive charge.

  Edward's return lit the fuse. A new war with Wales had given his former friends cause to hope for reconciliation, confident in the expectation that he would need their military services, as of old. But Edward, when he returned, came accompanied by his new associates - the French knights with whom he had taken up during his months of exile. This proved too much for the likes of Clifford and Leybourne to stomach — yet more foreigners coming into the kingdom, reaping the rewards and the favours that should rightfully have been their own. Desperation drove them into direct action. A ready-made banner was to hand in the form of the Provisions of Oxford - a scheme concocted in part to rid the land of undesirable foreigners. All they lacked was a leader, but the obvious candidate was not far to seek. On 25 April, in response to their call, Simon de Montfort returned to England.

  In early May, therefore, as Edward was struggling to bring relief to his besieged castles in north Wales, Montfort was mustering armed opposition in the heart of Henry Ill's kingdom. With his instinctive grasp for good publicity, the earl rallied his new army of malcontents at Oxford, where the reform programme had been launched almost five years before, and where they now renewed their oaths to uphold the Provisions. A letter was immediately dispatched to the king demanding that he denounce as mortal enemies all those who refused to do the same. The equally swift refusal this elicited provided the necessary pretext. In the first week of June, under Montfort's direction, Clifford, Leybourne and their companions unleashed a series of devastating attacks on the lands of the queen and her supporters. In time-honoured medieval fashion, they burned crops and buildings, reducing to ashes their enemies' economic assets. Hostages were also taken: the opening attack saw the Savoyard bishop of Hereford dragged from his cathedral and carried off to imprisonment at one of Clifford's castles.

  This new and ferocious firestorm caught the royal family completely off guard. Edward, for his part, responded swiftly, abandoning the war in Wales and racing south-east. His first thought was to secure the loyalty of the Channel ports and thus keep open the way for further foreign aid. Obtaining reinforcements, however, would take time, and this, like other commodities, was fast running out. When Edward rejoined his parents in London a few days later, he found a desperate situation. Henry and Eleanor had fled to the Tower, but it was not a well-planned move of the kind they had made two years before. Then the Tower had been well stocked and well garrisoned; now it was empty of both food and soldiers. Money, too, was in short supply, and without it even the existing foreign mercenaries that Edward had with him could not be retained for much longer. Ordinarily, the royal family could have turned to the rich citizens of London for support. But, at this moment, according to one chronicler, 'there was no one in the city who would give them a halfpennyworth of credit'. London's ruling oligarchy, although instinctively royalist, correctly surmised that this attitude placed them out of step with the rest of their fellow citizens. In the streets of the capital, as across the country as a whole, anti-royal and anti-foreign feeling was running high, especially after Edward's arrival with his mercenary army of Frenchmen.

  It was London, rather than its unwelcome royal residents, that received an ultimatum from Montfort in the last week of June. Were they for or against the Provisions of Oxford? The city's rulers decided that they were indeed in favour, and sent a delegation to the Tower to persuade the king that he should do likewise, at the same time urging him to get rid of his son's foreign knights. Henry was inclined to agree. By this stage the raids on royalist property were no longer confined to the west of England. Now there was plundering and devastation of royalist property in East Anglia too. With no provisions and no money, submission to the demands of Montfort and his allies seemed to be the only way out of the spiralling crisis.

  Before the king could make his decision, however, his eldest son had determined on independent action. On 29 June Edward and his followers rode to the New Temple, which lay to the west of the city just outside its walls. The chief headquarters in England of the famous crusading order of the Templars, the Temple was also favoured by the wealthy as a place of deposit for their riches. This, indeed, gave Edward his argument for admission. Finding the doors locked on his arrival, he obtained the keys by claiming he had come to view his mother's jewels. It was a lie. Once inside, Edward's men used iron hammers to smash open the chests, and seized, by one estimate, almost a thousand pounds. They then sped with their loot to Windsor Castle, which they proceeded to stock by similar methods, raiding the surrounding countryside for supplies. By resorting to deceit and robbery, Edward had obtained what his father in London lacked: the wherewithal - so he hoped - to resist Montfort.

  But Montfort was too good a general to have his fire drawn by this distraction. Moving south, the earl and his cohorts skirted Windsor and made instead for Kent, where they took all the ports except Dover — the mighty castle and its royalist garrison held out. In London, meanwhile, the situation had descended into total chaos. The raid on the Temple, an outrageous act of royal presumption, had triggered the feared revolution. Within hours of Edward's departure the lesser citizens had taken to the streets and begun attacking and looting the properties of prominent royalists and foreigners. On 4 July, still trapped in the Tower, Henry III agreed to submit to the demands of his enemies. These had now expanded in line with Montfort's estimation of his own success and the virulence of the xenophobia he had unleashed. Having begun their protest by demanding that the realm should be governed only by 'native-born men', the opposition now insisted on nothing less than the total expulsion of all foreigners, 'never to return'.

  The king might meekly accept this new provision; his Provencal queen could never do so. In any case, she was made of sterner stuff than her husband. Even as Montfort's forces advanced on the capital, Eleanor of Provence decided she would rather take a stand with her eldest son. On 13 July she and a small number of attendants set out from the Tower by boat, intent on following the Thames upstream to Windsor. But word of her departure travelled more quickly than the queen herself. By the time she reached London Bridge, a hostile crowd was waiting, and, as her the barge tried to pass beneath, they let fly with insults, eggs and stones. Realising that her life was in danger, the queen abandoned her voyage and took refuge in the palace of the bishop of London.

  The royal family was beaten. Two days later Montfort and his forces entered London, and Henry and Eleanor submitted. Within a week, acting on Henry's orders, the garrison at Dover Castle had also surrendered. Only Edward, with his army of French knights at Windsor, continued to resist, though with an increasing awareness that resistance might prove useless. Their desperate attempt to take Bristol a few days before London's fall had failed in the face of opposition from the town's angry citizens. News of the loss of Dover, which ended all hope of aid from abroad, must have coincided with news of Montfort's advance: the earl and his army, now marching under royal banners, left London on 24 July, intending to besiege Windsor. There was no choice but to agree to terms. The demand for the expulsion of all foreigners had been devised chiefly with this moment in mind. As Edward himself rejoined his parents, his army of French knights were escorted to the coast, having sworn 'never to return'.

  Montfort was now effectively in charge of the kingdom. In a few short months, through a skilful combination of violence and xenophobic rabble-rousing, he had achieved the mastery over Henry III that had eluded him for the past two years. Flushed with success, he began reordering government along lines of his own choosing, promoting his friends to high office and granting them custody of key royal castles. Faced with this monopoly of force, the best that the
king and his family could manage was a secret appeal for help to the king of France. This, too, however, proved futile. King Louis obligingly summoned Henry and his family to Boulogne, along with Montfort and his supporters, only to surprise everyone by ruling that the July settlement should stand. The royalist attempt to discredit Montfort had actually succeeded in granting his government a measure of international legitimacy.

  Back home, however, support for the earl's regime was already evaporating. The blitzkrieg of the summer may have been devastatingly effective in military terms, but it had left a bitter legacy of recrimination in its wake. Those whose lands and property had been despoiled wanted compensation, but the new government was insufficiently organised to provide redress. A specially convened parliament at the start of September had found no way forward. At the start of October the archbishop of Canterbury — a Savoyard himself, and hence a victim of the attacks — ordered the excommunication of those who had taken part in the raids, including Montfort, whom he named as the chief culprit. In simple terms, Montfort was unable to sort out the mess his coup had caused.

  More dangerous still to the earl was the internal collapse of his own party. The men who had invited him back to England - Roger Clifford, Roger Leybourne and their ilk - did not care in the slightest for the Provisions of Oxford, nor, for that matter, for any of their leader's private grievances. Their sole ambition had been to revenge themselves on the queen and to restore their relationship with her eldest son. With the exile of the foreign knights from Windsor, the way for reconciliation became clear. Once again, Montfort had failed to foresee the logical conclusion of his actions. Within weeks of his surrender Edward had settled his difference with Clifford, Leybourne and the rest. In an agreement on 18 August, they swore 'to be his friends in all his affairs'.